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THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 

BY 

ISRAEL ZANGWILL 



PRICE 25 CENTS 



NEW YORK 

THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO. 

1915 



Copyright, 1915, 

THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE CO. 

Published December 24, 1915 



©CLA420074 

DEC 28 1915 



•^^^' 



'^^-^^ 



THE WAR AND THE WOMEN 
By- ISRAEL ZANGWILL 

GERMAN HUMOR AND THE GERMAN FRAU 

IT cannot be a mere coincidence that the war 
was made in Germany, the Male State in 
excelsis, where women, in the Kaiser's favorite 
saying, must stick to her three K's — Kitchen, 
Kids and Kirk, we may perhaps render it. Not for 
her the glories of the Turnverei7i, the beatitude of 
the beer-hall, or the gospel of slashing the other 
cheek: not even a legal status separate from her 
lord, whose professorial or medical title she shares. 

That to this status of the German woman 
Armageddon may be due is no fantastic specula- 
tion. For it is only by sheer absence of humor that 
Germany's brain could have tumefied with the no- 
tion of a Teutonic mission to mankind — by sub- 
marine and poison-gas — and absence of humor is 
directly traced by Meredith to contempt for the 
woman. " If the German men," he observed in his 
" Essay on Comedy," " would consent to talk on 
equal terms with their women, and to listen to 
them, Comedy, or in any form, the Comic spirit 
will come to them." That is to say, women's cor- 
rective criticism would have brought proportion, 
and proportion is the mother of humor. But they 
have not listened to their women, and so (as by the 
bad fairy's gift at a christening) all the other de- 
lightful gifts of the race, all the music, science and 
philosophy, are spoiled. For the dancing smile in 
the eyes of wisdom, the Teuton has only the grin 
of the gargoyle. " His irony," says Meredith, " is 
a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like 
a blast from the dragon's mouth. He must and will 
be Titan." 

If, then, his insolent isolation from feminine in- 
fluence is the deepest cause of his swashbuckling 
temper, it follows that the position of women is not 
a factor of history to be lightly disregarded, nor 



one that fails to wreak its effects because historians 
and politicians neglect to take it intg account. 

WOMEN AND THE OHM 

Electricians divide bodies by the resistance they 
offer to the passage of electric force as calculated 
in " ohms." Humanity may be divided into classes 
by the resistance they offer to new ideas. The 
Americans, for example, have a small ohmage, the 
English a high. Judged by the evolution of their 
women, old countries like Sweden and Finland are 
less resistant than even the New World. In Eng- 
land woman has not moved a step in any direction 
without a hue and cry. Tragical is the story of 
the first medical pioneers, and equality with the 
man physician is even yet not won, though every 
new female doctor is now hailed as a godsend by 
the male millions engaged night and day in making 
work for her. The " lost volts " is the pathetic 
name for the units of electricity wasted through 
resistance. What a ghastly waste of human force 
this British bulldoggedness is answerable for! 

But sometimes in every country this ohmage of 
obstinacy is overwhelmed by sudden forces. Social 
evolution, which proceeds usually like the snail, 
proceeds at these moments like the kangaroo — " by 
leaps and bounds" — just as geological changes 
which in normal times are imperceptibly slow are 
sometimes cataclysmic. Such a volcanic upheaval 
has the war brought to women. In this transfor- 
mation of the social landscape the suffrage question 
has become a relatively insignificant landmark. 

VENUS AND HER SHELL 

The cause of woman's sudden rise in status is the 
discovery that, like the horse, she is not merely 
a domestic beast of burden, but may also be useful 
for war. In a passive sense the discovery was not 
new. Did not Sir Walter Scott announce it in his 
famous apostrophe to *' Woman in our hours of 
ease? " Did not Victor Hugo glorify the French- 



women in the siege of Paris, who " gave to despair- 
ing combatants the encouragement of their smile, 
who refused even before hunger, even before death, 
the surrender of their city "? But Patience smiling 
at grief, though it may be set on a monument, wins 
little real regard in the " man-made " world. Not 
even the active business services universally ren- 
dered in France by Frenchwomen could rescue them 
from the insignificance attaching to a sex that 
merely creates and does not destroy. And in Eng- 
land, though Florence Nightingale practically saved 
our Crimean Army, she was impotent to help the 
army of women pushing into the arena at home. 
Besides, war had not for centuries really come 
home to the British breast. In the great Napoleonic 
days when Jane Austen was writing her quiet 
country-house comedies, with never a word of the 
events that were shaking mankind, war was for 
England a foreign adventure, restricted mainly to 
two social classes, the cream of the cream, and the 
dregs of the gutter. Your military acquaintance — 
your gay ensigns and crusty colonels — went off to 
the wars much as an expedition now goes off to the 
Antarctic. It was all very brave and interesting, 
but except on the black days described in " Vanity 
Fair," when casualty lists were coming in, it did 
not particularly touch the rooted population. If 
this was so with the male civilian, how much more 
with the female. But now it appears that the 
civilian cannot be left out of the business and 
that the female may be as destructive as the male. 
Women — even ladies of quality — can actually 
make shells, nay, accoring to Mr. Asquith, who 
saw thousands of whilom dressmakers, milliners 
and parlor-maids at their fell work, they can make 
them " perhaps a little better " than men. And 
this revelation led our Arch Anti-Suffragist to the 
surmise that possibly they could do many other 
unexpected things. A Daniel come to judgment, 
indeed! It is true there were — long before^^.e 



war — seven million women, *' gainfully occupied," 
but the State had never yet observed them, nor 
ever considered their employment or unemployment 
a factor in social phenomena. To-day every eye 
is upon Venus rising- — as in Botticelli's picture — 
on her shell. The State includes women in the 
National Register. The Times devotes to their 
services a chapter of its " History of the War." 

SEE THE CONQUERING HEROINE COMES ! 

And not only does woman feed the fighting line 
directly as munition-maker and general provider, 
and tend it as nurse, doctor and ambulance bearer, 
it has been discovered that in every direction she 
can relieve man and release him for the front. In 
the antediluvian age before the war, any feminine 
encroachment upon the male preserve would have 
been met as the workmen in the Brieux play. La 
femme Seule, met their women competitors — with 
the male fist. And if the new function involved 
changes of vesture or appearance, then the small 
boy, whom I have elsewhere saluted as " the scav- 
enger of manners," would have made life unbear- 
able for the innovatress until she had worn him 
out by multiplication. But to-day? Why, the mere 
pictures in " The Times' History of the War " re- 
veal women (in appropriate costumes) as police- 
women, telegraph-messengers, postwomen, plow- 
women, sheep-shearers, page-girls, motorists, van- 
drivers, commissionaires, railway booking-clerks, 
ticket and luggage porters, omnibus and tram con- 
ductresses, bill-posters, butchers and bargees ! There 
is even — O tempora, O mores — a games-mistress 
in a boys' school! The very Government Offices — 
immemorial abodes of the Barnacle — have women 
attendants, and I have myself gone up to a Min- 
ister in a woman-escorted lift. What wonder if 
there move through our streets without ragamuffin 
rebuke the khaki-clad warriors of the Women's 
Volunteer Reserve! Thus ends the long divorce 



between arms and the woman, thus revives the 
Shakespearean picture of the days of " King John." 

l'\)r your own ladios and paU'-vlsas d maids. 
Like Amazons, como tripping afU r druas, 
Their thimbles into aruud gauntlets thange. 
Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts 
To fierce and bloody inclination ! 

THE SEXLESS SINEWS OF WAR 

But in addition to the many ways in which wom- 
an is actually seen stoking the furnaces of war, 
there is a growing recognition that even the woman 
at home is playing her part in the war. That men 
must fight and women must weep was long the 
stock argument of the Anti- Suffragists — for who 
would give a vote to tears? In vain we Suffragists 
tried to make them understand that the fighting 
part of a nation was only the white-crested wave 
that throws itself furiously on the shore — behind 
it was the whole ocean of national energy. In vain 
we pointed out that a nation was after all only a 
collection of homes and that it was from these 
homes that all the national strength issued, were 
it but in the shape of " man that is born of woman " 
or resources born of both. To-day press mega- 
phones and flamboyant posters have proclaimed 
this truth to the dullest. Every hoarding has 
shown us the munition-maker hand in hand with 
the soldier, warriors both. The War Loan carried 
on the tale. " Do you want to save our Sailors' 
and Soldiers' lives? " women, no less than men, 
were asked in great Governmental advertisements. 
" Do you want to bring the War to an end? " 
" You can make your money fight for you." '' If 
you cannot use the sword for your Country, you 
can use your pen by filling up this form." The 
silver bullet, in short, can be sped by a woman's 
hand, and the sinews of war are sexless. 



GERMANY DISCOVERS WOMAN 

With half a million German women making war 
material, from the very outbreak of war, with the 
domesticated Frau producing forty per cent of the 
explosives and fifty per cent of the equipment, 
not to mention her replacing railway, tram-way 
and motor-men, it could hardly escape attention 
even in Germany that the three K's had been trans- 
cended and that the great male K (Krieg or 
Khaki) was not so outside the female province as 
that arrant K, the Kaiser, had imagined. As the 
Frankfurter Zeitung confessed with characteristic 
German thoroughness, " Many of us have in these 
months felt it to be a defect that in Germany the 
State, with its system of universal service, em- 
braces only the men, and them only in so far as 
they are capable of bearing arms. This system 
was decided upon at a time when wars were con- 
ducted with weapons only, and it no longer fits the 
present state of things, in which everything, gold 
and food, industrial products and science, is a 
means of carrying on war and in which the war 
itself consists to a great extent of scientific and 
economic labor." 

War consists to a great extent of scientific and 
economic labor. So at last man has discovered mid- 
day at twelve o'clock ! " Every pit is a trench, 
every workshop a rampart," cries Lloyd-George, 
vividly lamenting the legions of miners and muni- 
tion-makers a short-sighted policy had lured to 
Flanders. Armageddon may, it appears, finally 
hinge on the manufacture of machine-tools. With 
war thus got beyond the tomahawk stage, the poor 
squaw can now as little be excluded from the tug 
of it as she ever was from the misery and murder- 
ousness of it. Battles are won in the factory as 
well as the field, and in the cornfield no less than 
the field of war. They were always won in the 
kitchen and the nursery. 

8 



FRANCE STILL SEEKING THE WOMAN 

The game of " Cherchez la Femme " has so long 
distorted the French vision that France cannot 
even now find her as quickly as Germany has done. 
For Germany had only to open its eyes to see: 
whereas the long practise of the leer had given 
France a permanent squint. Hence while in the 
German railways, tramways and shops a system- 
atic substitution of women for men began simul- 
taneously with the mobilization of the army, in 
France the substituted reserve was as far as pos- 
sible drawn from males too old or too young for 
war, and although women did largely replace men, 
it was mainly as a family affair. Mothers, sis- 
ters, daughters, wives, stepped into the breach less 
as women than as relatives. The Paris " under- 
ground " set the example — which was largely fol- 
lowed — of inviting the women of the family to 
occupy the places of their menkind and keep them 
warm till their return, and in philanthropy no less 
than in industry woman has not asserted herself as 
an independent sex, with separate organizations. 
Thus in France woman is still not " on her own." 
Nevertheless, since many of the males, alas ! will 
never come back to their posts, some of this new 
labor must inevitably escape dislodgement at the 
end of the war. Not by thus evading the labor 
problem of women can France circumvent it. At 
the worst their temporary employment will have 
thrown considerable new illumination upon their 
capacities and military value. Italy, which is be- 
low even France in its handling of the woman ques- 
tion, and which at the outset of the war saw 
woman conductors hooted off the cars, is little 
likely to end the war in the same mood. 

THE PUGNACIOUS PANKHURSTS 

And all this new activity and all this reinter- 
pretation and recognition of old activity takes place 
in the fierce light that beats upon a boom. Had 



not the Female Suffrage question been set in vio- 
lent motion by the Pankhursts, it is possible that 
the object lessons of the war would not have been 
reaped for the benefit of the cause. And nothing , 
has more contributed to the sinking in of these 
morals than the wise and patriotic action of the 
Pankhursts in suspending their militancy, whose 
relative innocuousness was, moreover, suddenly re- 
vealed by the bonfires of the man-made hell. " The 
Suffragette," still doggedly declaring that there 
was no way of winning the vote save by fighting, 
and that in the impossibility of fighting it was use- 
less going on, suspended publication. The other 
Suffrage parties, which had not placed their trust 
in their fighting power, found no such difficulty in 
continuing their organs, even though their activi- 
ties were mainly transferred to relief work and 
military service of every kind, for which their ex- 
isting organization of women provided a ready- 
made machine. The National League for Opposing 
Woman Suffrage pursued similarly the path of 
beneficence, so that the Suffrage movement may be 
congratulated on having called into existence this 
valuable federation of female activities. The Anti- 
Suffragist women had always occupied a Gilbertian 
platform in emphasizing from it that woman's 
place was the home, and the paradox was not di- 
minished by the attempt to eke out its negations 
by a demand for the municipal franchise. For it is 
obvious that the female Anti-Suffragist, like Aris- 
totle's skeptic, cannot stir a finger without self- 
contradiction. The crowning irony was her enlist- 
ment in the khaki clad ranks of the Volunteer 
Training Corps and the National Reserve. No 
wonder she made a point of " eschewing advertise- 
ment " and with " patriotic abnegation " silently 
absorbing herself in other female bodies. A mili- 
tant Anti-Suffragist might have touched even Mrs. 
Humphry Ward's sense of humor. 

10 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANTI-SUFFRAGE 

There was once a social state composed of fam- 
ilies, each unit circling round and represented by 
the male bread-winner. He went out into the 
hurly-burly: the woman remained the delicate 
flower of the home. It was a conception not with- 
out its beauty. For this it is now sought to sub- 
stitute families with a dual center, and equal rights 
in the hurly-burly for both sexes. It is a concep- 
tion not without its ugliness. But the striving for 
it is not a mere play of the brain. The female 
flowers have been already flung out of the home: 
millions of Englishwomen have been driven into 
factories, shops and offices. The Anti-Suffragists 
did not attempt to drive back this labor into the 
security and sanctity of the home, and the attempt 
to secure for it the same political status as male 
labor they combated. Placed between two worlds, 
they made the worst of both. 

THE CRUSADE OF CHRISTABEL 

Their arch-antagonist, Miss Christabel Pank- 
hurst, abandoned her place of exile in France to 
tour in the States as a champion of England and 
rendered valuable service in that hotbed of pro- 
Germanism by her oratorical and dialectical 
powers; her repartee, sharpened by years of prac- 
tise against the Briton, galling now the German- 
American. Possibly there was in this campaign of 
hers some of the remorse and zeal of the convert. 
Possibly she felt she owed reparation to England 
for being one of the factors that inclined the 
Kaiser to war. At any rate the tyranny and 
truculence of which she had for years accused the 
British Government became now the peculiar prop- 
erty of Prussia, while England loomed as Liberty's 
one homestead and safeguard. On her return from 
this penitential pilgrimage she abounded even more 
in this sense. " The Suffragette " was revived. 
But the reborn offspring was no longer the legiti- 

II 



mate organ of the movement. It should rather 
have been called " The War Baby," so unmistak- 
ably was it a child of military passion. (It is sig- 
nificant that the care of the War Babies is pre- 
cisely the task selected by the Pankhursts from all 
the philanthropic possibilities.) Not one of the 
press demagogues who daily or weekly whip up the 
beast in man, not one of the militarists who are 
out to crush militarism could vie with Christabel 
Pankhurst in her impassioned torrent of Jingoese. 
The worst extravagances of our Junker journalists 
were outdone. I know no male fire-eater who has 
set forth so drastic a program as this " female of 
the species." 

" Institute compulsory national service, military 
and industrial. Tighten the Blockade so that Ger- 
many shall not receive a single thing helpful to 
them in the prosecution of the war. Purify the 
official organization of the country of naturalized 
Germans and of Germans born in England but of 
German blood. Purify it, too, of any British blood 
who may be pro-German or half-hearted in the 
prosecution of the war." Even " true-born Eng- 
lishmen," you see, less bellicose than the majority, 
are to be kicked out of England! And it is only 
the other day that the papers were discsusing what 
island could serve as the St. Helena of the Suf- 
fragettes. 

CHRISTABEL, ANTI-SUFFRAGIST 

Of course this root-and-branch rhodomontade is 
only another illustration of her headlong extrem- 
ism, of her crude conception of statesmanship as 
militancy, and of tactics as invariably frontal and 
furious. And her most furious rushes have been 
directed, oddly enough, against the Union of Dem- 
ocratic Control, constituted of the very men who 
first risked their reputation on behalf of her de- 
rided movement. Not that they had not already 
been castigated the moment they had disagreed 



with her tactics. But she might have remembered 
that the Union was the first political body to an- 
nounce that by '* Democratic Control " is meant a 
joint government of men and women, and that its 
object was to sweep away the secret diplomacy and 
veiled autocracy that nullify the male vote, and will 
make the female vote, when it is obtained, equally 
ineffective in the vast issues of peace and war. 
These issues mould our lives far more than the 
questions we are permitted to vote upon, and to 
bring them equally under the sphere of the vote 
must be the desire of every suffragist. But then 
there never was a person more essentially Anti- 
Suffragist than Christabel Pankhurst. Nobody has 
ever been allowed a vote in the affairs of her 
Union. She is simply a dictator bom out of her 
due sex and time. It happened that the state of 
society afforded no scope for her natural driving- 
power, and so she was reduced to the leadership of 
women. But her constant obsession with the image 
of Joan of Arc shows — as the psycho-analyst would 
say — that all along she has subconsciously hank- 
ered to lead men. For Joan of Arc did not win the 
battles of France with an army of Amazons. Now, 
spurring and cheering on the army of men, bidding 
them roll their enemies in the dust. Miss Pankhurst 
is at last in her true element. And the word 
" purge," which she ingeminates, recalls her other 
ambition to be Cromwell — the Cromwell of " Pride's 
Purge " and " Take away that bauble." She 
actually calls for a Cromwell to purge a certain 
London Club of its " pro-Germans." And her fol- 
lowing has changed with her program. Of the 
" Women's Social and Political Union " and " The 
Suffragette " practically only the names remain. 
The Pankhursts are now the idols of the mob. 
Philistine M.P.'s have supported their meetings. 
Bishops blessed their propaganda, noble lords 
prosed on their platform, genteel ladies walked in 
their processions to demand the free and equal 



right to make explosives, and the papers have 
photographed and puffed them. Reported at last 
and at length by the great organs that had boy- 
cotted her, acclaimed by the great mobs that had 
clamored to duck her, Christabel Pankhurst in the 
new-born " Suffragette " cried in capital letters, 
with a lack of humor that touched the sublime, 

" TRUST THE PEOPLE AND DEFY THE CRANKS." 

It is a tragic circle in human affairs that the ex- 
martyr becomes the parvenu persecutor. But this 
assimilation of the Pankhursts to the mob is an 
asset to their cause proper. The masses, taught 
thus to find in woman so potent a reinforcement of 
their prejudices, will come to recognize how stupid 
was the Anti- Suffrage policy which deprived them 
of so valuable an ally. It was always the fatal 
mistake of Miss Pankhurst to overlook that Wom- 
an Suffrage was essentially a man's question, that 
in man's hands lay the ultimate power of granting 
or withholding it, and that only by pleasing men 
could women — in the last analysis — achieve their 
emancipation. Now that by a happy accident the 
Pankhurst's platform coincides with that of the 
man in the street, now that the Pankhursts are 
able to " feed the brute " with his own gross diet, 
they stand far nearer his heart and their goal. 
Not to fight man, but to second and sponge him in 
his own fight, is the road to female suffrage. The 
palm denied to the Christian martyr will be won by 
the recruiting sergeant. 

The tragedy of this degeneration lies not in the 
character of Christabel Pankhurst — which is un- 
changed and unchangeable — but in the character of 
Mrs. Pankhurst, possessed by the daimon of her 
daughter. It is impossible to read the earlier 
speeches of Mrs. Pankhurst without seeing that in 
her the age had produced one of tliose rare spirits 
who come to interpret and incarnate the great say- 
ing of St. Paul to the Corinthians : " Hopeth all 

14 



things, suffereth all things, believeth all things." 
The first Mrs. Pankhurst knew that the Kingdom 
of Heaven suffereth no violence and is not taken by 
assault, and her victory, had it come then, would 
have been a victory for female suffrage, for the 
contribution of gentleness and social reform, which 
woman has to bring to politics. The victory, when 
it comes now, will be only a victory for a swash- 
buckling suffrage, apparelled at all points like a 



THE WOMEN'S PEACE CONGRESS 

Happily other women have appeared, not so con- 
tent as the Pankhursts " to play the sedulous ape " 
to man, or to be dominated by his outlook. The 
women who met at The Hague in an International 
Congress that embraced both Englishwomen and 
Germanwomen had anticipated Romain Holland's 
appeal to women to cease to be " men's shadows." 
" The women who do not fight have no right to 
goad on the fight," said the distinguished French- 
women who addressed a greeting to the Congress. 
And they laid down " the fundamental principle of 
feminism " as " the wish to create, while destroying 
war, a better and juster humanity." Just because 
they had no political voice in any of the belligerent 
countries, it was for them now to say what the men 
who were fighting could not say, and to preserve 
the spirit of international fraternity. And so this 
Congress of Women from a dozen nations, under 
the presidency of Jane Addams, protested unani- 
mously against " the madness and horror of war," 
believing with Queen Elinor in " King John ": 

This might have boon prevented and made whole 
With very easy arguments of love 
Which now the manage of two kingdoms must 
With fearful bloody issue arbitrate. 

The Congress protested, too, against the assump- 
tion that women were protected in the war, and 
adjured " the Governments of the world " to put an 

15 



end to it. Nor was their protest to be Platonic. 
Under the inspiration of the practical and elabo- 
rately worked out project by Miss Julia Wales, of 
Wisconsin University, entitled " Continuous Media- 
tion Without Armistice," it was resolved to try to 
create a Conference of Neutral Nations for this 
purpose, also " to invite suggestions for settlement 
from each of the belligerent nations," and in any 
case to submit simultaneously to all of them " rea- 
sonable proposals as a basis of peace." Women 
would, in fact, try to mediate between their males, 
as one tries to disentangle dogs. Nay, more, the 
women have actually gone out from this Congress 
— like Queen's Messengers — and have been received 
by Kings, Premiers and Presidents. The scheme of 
" Continuous Mediation " has been adopted likewise 
by the Quakers and is said to be regarded by some 
Governments as " the sanest plan yet suggested." 
For climax, the Congress resolved that an inter- 
national meeting of women shall be held in the 
same town and at the same time as the Congress of 
Powers, which shall frame the terms of the Peace 
Settlement after the war, for the purpose of pre- 
senting practical proposals to the Conference. 
Women will be " men's shadows," but in what a 
novel sense ! Side by side with the portentous and 
pontificial Male Congress which has always hither- 
to done the carving of the nations and never failed 
to make a hash of it, will sit — like sober peahens 
beside their peacocks — a body of women interpret- 
ing national dignity and sovereignty and all the 
grandiose vocabulary of the male in terms of hu- 
man life. 

THE peahen's point OF VIEW 

" We women judge war differently from men," 
said Dr. Aletta Jacobs, the Dutch initiatress of the 
Peace Congress. " Men consider in the first place 
the economic results, the extension of power and so 
forth. But what is material loss to us women in 
comparison to the number of fathers, husbands, 

i6 



brothers and sons who march out to war, never to 
return? We women consider above all the damage 
to the race resulting from war and the grief and 
the pain and the misery it entails." That woman 
should thus revise what Thackeray called " The 
Devil's code of honor " is not surprising, for she 
has actually borne in pain and reared in sick 
anxiety the body it is proposed to mutilate. " Un- 
ruly" as Shakespeare's Duchess of York, she cries 
to her lord: 

Hadst thou groaned for him 

As I have done, thoud'st be more pitiful. 

I do not forget the Spartan mother who bade her 
son return with his shield or on it. But that mother 
had had no chance of developing an outlook of her 
own. Sparta was not so much a state as a barrack : 
every mother's son, unless he had been killed off as 
too sickly for a soldier, was taken from her at the 
age of seven to be stupefied by drill. She could 
only please her master by exaggerated echoes of his 
" Laconic " wisdom. To-day even in the Sparta of 
Prussia women have courted martyrdom by their 
protests against the war. And the wisdom of even 
the male Peace-maker is no longer to go unques- 
tioned, for as w.e have seen woman has resolved to 
shadow the Peace Congress and send it sugges- 
tions. There is a certain high comedy in the situa- 
tion, because everything will probably have been 
cut-and-dried beforehand by secret treaty, as it 
was at the Congress of Berlin. But what a stride 
forward in the position of woman since 1878, when 
Beaconsfield and Bismarck remodeled Europe with 
results that are before us ! It is she who aspires to 
save civilization in the collapse of the politicians, 
and religion in the breakdown of the bishops. Not 
every pious lady has been making shells on Sun- 
day, and Christianity never had a nobler and more 
eloquent apostle than Miss Maude Royden, touring- 
heathen Britain in a van. The seventh centenary 
of Magna Charta — not astonishingly ignored by 

17 



Englishmen — was celebrated this year by the Wom- 
en's Freedom League. 

WOMAN AS SANCHO PANZA 

Thus there is solid ground for confidence that the 
enfranchisement of women will not end in the ad- 
dition of ten million pseudo-males to the electorate. 
What Mr. Roosevelt — in his gentle voice — calls the 
" shrieking sisterhood " will not merely echo the 
bawling brotherhood. Much more likely is it that 
the pseudo-chivalry of the male, with all its glitter- 
ing medieval lumber, will be swept away by female 
common sense as remorselessly as his military 
plumes and laces have been shorn away by the 
shears of necessity. Woman will play the Sancho 
Panza to the demented Don Quixote, with his bab- 
ble of " battles, enchantments, adventures, ex- 
travagances, combats and challenges," and where 
he saw two mighty armies with pomp and 
pageantry of " arms, colors, devices and mottoes," 
she will see only the two flocks of sheep that were 
really there, obscured by the cloud of dust: the 
dumb herds driven to slaughter and lost in the 
dust thrown into the world's eyes by politicians and 
poets. She will see Rozinante, not as the war-horse 
clothed in thunder, but as the lean starveling hack 
of reality, and Dulcinea, in whose honor the battle 
is joined, as the frowsy hoyden she is. There are, 
indeed, a few men who can see through the dust 
almost as clearly as women. " Only the other day," 
complains the Times of July 17, " a member of 
Parliament was talking about the money that 
would be wanted for housing after the war, and 
evidence is always cropping up to show that social 
reform still fills the mind of politicians and officials 
as the real business before them. The war is only 
an episode in their eyes!" De:;?enerate Britons! 
How — as Roosevelt witheringly puts it — shall milk-" 
and-water match blood-and-iron? Unfortunately 
Miss Margaret Scott tells us that without a quart 



of milk a day a sturdy soldier cannot be reared, and 
it would even seem as if " social reform " is as 
necessary to safeguard the population as trenches 
and field-guns. 

AFTER THE WAR 

Historians tell us that the Crusades, designed to 
win the tomb of Christ, promoted commercial inter- 
course between East and West. Germany, setting 
out to assert the male ideal, has given an immense 
jog to the feminine. But the price would have 
staggered the optimism of a Pangloss. Ho-ti,. 
whose house must be burned down before he could 
taste crackling, roasted his pig infinitely cheaper, . 
The loss of legions of young men will increase the 
number of spinsters, who will clamor with increas- 
ing outspokenness for a revised sex ethic. The 
entry of women into so many occupations will pro- 
duce female blacklegs and gravely agitate the 
Trade Unions. There will be friction all along the 
line at those points which women have not yet 
stormed — and these embrace in England the whole 
of the legal profession, the higher walks of the 
civil service and even of medicine, not to mention 
Parliament and Government. The end of the war 
will bring not Peace, but sex strife, added to the 
inevitable economic discontents. For the social 
landscape cannot be transformed for woman with- 
out changing man's situation, too. When the val- 
leys are exalted the hills are apt to subside. By an 
odd coincidence the female chapter of the Tmies' 
** History of the War " winds up with a picture of 
a woman " Making a Doll's House." That was, it 
appears, and not only from Ibsen, an exclusively 
male occupation. What sinister symbolism lurks in 
this climax? Is the man to be henceforward the 
pampered puppet? 



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